Modern libraries have experienced increased demands from patrons, in terms of needs for larger and larger holdings of books and other tangible materials. Accordingly, it is not uncommon for public libraries, for example, to handle collection and distribution of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of books and materials every year. Tasks of libraries in handling these ever-increasing volumes are often overwhelming where manual labor is employed for such tasks.
In response to such growing volumes of materials, automated methods and systems for materials handling have been developed for library environments as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,074,156, entitled, "Library Cart Loading System and Method", issued to Mark R. Frich, an inventor of the present invention. In such systems, library materials are received from a "book" depository, transported to a check-in system for subsequent cataloging and inventory update, and ultimately placed on carts for subsequent re-shelving for subsequent patron requests or browsing.
In the aforementioned automated systems, it is important to know the book binding orientation of a book prior to subsequent operations such as loading books onto a cart. Procedures for determining book-binding orientation may include squaring operations in addition to various electronic sensing, for example the location of a barcode or the like. Such procedures for determining book binding orientation are generally expensive, and add to the overall complexity and cost of the library materials handling system. Thus there is a need for a simple bookbinding orientation locator method and apparatus which may be applicable to not only library material handling systems, but also book publishers or other applications requiring knowledge of the book binding orientation of a book.